​Critics are really excited about the new season of Black Mirror, a show whose first two seasons I only occasionally sampled. But on the strength of the reviews I watched one of the new episodes yesterday, which TV Insider critic Matt Roush identified as the best of six-episode anthology: “Playtest.” It was, critics said, the closest that the series comes to pure and traditional horror, which happens to be one of my fields of expertise. I wrote the book on it, after all. The episode tells the story of an American tourist named Cooper (Wyatt Russell) who takes part in a video game company’s beta test of a neural implant that creates an augmented reality horror video game experience. If you haven’t seen the episode, you should probably stop reading because to criticize it is to give away part of the “twist” at the end.

“Guaranteed to make you jump,” Roush said, but as Cooper himself offers during the episode, jump scares aren’t much to build a story on. I found the episode disappointing, and the reason for that is that the story very carefully apes the form of a horror classic and strips of it of its impact.

The story in question is Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and “Playtest” carefully inverts each part of the story. In “Occurrence,” a wealthy Southern plantation owner named Peyton Farquhar is lured into a trap by Union soldiers during the Civil War, revealing his Confederate loyalty and resulting in his hanging as a saboteur. Thinking of his beloved family, he escapes when the noose snaps and makes his way back home amid strange hallucinations, only to have it revealed that the entire story was his dying brain’s final fantasy as the noose snapped his neck.

“Playtest” inverts the details while keeping the narrative thrust. In this version, an impoverished American tourist is lured into a trap by unscrupulous corporate types. Like Farquhar, our tourist, Cooper, is also thinking of his family, but this time it is with horror, not longing. He is deathly afraid of his mother’s Alzheimer’s and the memory of his dead father. The company inserts a device into his neck, much like a digital noose, and they put him into an augmented reality horror game, whose jump scares take up the lion’s share of the hour. But in another inversion of “Owl Creek,” Cooper takes his noose voluntarily, and with high expectations of fun. When the hallucinations—sorry, “augmented reality mental projections”—turn dangerous, the digital noose is said to malfunction, just like the snapped noose in “Owl Creek” and he is led to believe that he has been freed from the game. He travels back home to his mother, at which point the show reveals that, like Farhquar in “Owl Creek,” he has fantasized his return home in the instant when the device malfunctions. But the show isn’t content to ape the ending of “Owl Creek” only once; instead, it has this revelation become a nested fantasy, repeating the revelation to diminishing returns by having the entirety of the game be the crazed ravings of his dying brain in the split second between receiving the digital noose and his inevitable death.

The comparison with “Owl Creek” also illuminates why this episode didn’t work for me. In “Owl Creek” Bierce sets up the emotional shock of the sudden climax by having his hero think he is escaping back to a better life, to happiness. The ending, in just a sentence, cuts the legs out from under the character and the reader, presenting both shock and emotional heft in a very brief space. By contrast, Cooper in “Playtest” is trying to escape his own life at every level—through ignoring his mother’s phone calls, through traveling the world, through video games—so his return home is not a longed-for triumph but simply more sadness. Because Cooper does nothing but fail to escape misery, his equally sudden death doesn’t play as a surprise but an inevitability, not catharsis but culmination.

Reviews of the episode, when not philosophizing about the dangers of smartphones and video games, said it was the closest the series came to The Twilight Zone, which is ironic since Zone broadcast an episode (recut from a French film) adapting Bierce’s “Owl Creek Bridge.”

I’m not even sure that episode writer Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror, knew that he was paralleling “Owl Creek.” He told Rolling Stone that he was just trying to create a pastiche of “old-school horror” layered atop the horror video games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil he played while writing the episode:

"It partly came about because I wanted to do a haunted house story," Brooker says. "Compared to some of the episodes, it's quite a romp. It's not like a message episode. I kept calling it our Evil Dead 2, which I think slightly annoys Dan [Trachtenberg], our director, but he's even geekier about games than I am. It was very deliberate that we wanted to reference old-school horror."

I’m not sure whether I would be more disappointed to learn that Brooker tried and failed to make a modern “Owl Creek,” or that he didn’t know it at all and simply absorbed the tropes from the TV shows, movies, and video games inspired by it.

Either way, the episode is fine as far as it goes, if you like jump scares and screaming and a little bit of atmosphere. On that level, it’s again OK, but even on the surface level of “scaring a guy in a haunted house with fake horror” it doesn’t compare to the 1971 Night Gallery segment “A Question of Fear,” in which Leslie Nielsen spends the night inside the Psycho house, which is rigged as an interactive horror game, with a truly gruesome ending that similarly culminates in the hero’s inevitable demise immediately after he thinks he’s defeated the game. The reason for that death, however, is much more effective than the random malfunction of technology in “Playtest,” but similarly plays on the idea of exploiting the participant’s deepest fears.

Funnily enough, when BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast radio versions of old Twilight Zone episodes earlier this year, the first of the series was “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the-twilight-zone-cult-sci-fi-show-to-return-for-bbc-radio-4-extra-series-a6887006.html

Reply

Lurkster

10/22/2016 11:55:33 am

Jason, have you seen Syfy's new series Channel Zero? I'd be interested in your thoughts on that production as it caught me by surprise in a good way. I was expecting cheesy gore and shallow characters. But the ending scenes of the second episode took what seemed to be a low budget rendering of a weak plot doomed to be dependent on supernatural tropes and spun it completely around into something completely different. So much so, I'm rather excited to see where it goes because it seems to be a very solid dose of classic horror. Everything I expected from American Horror Story in the first season, but was sadly disappointed to find lacking.

Reply

Denise

10/22/2016 02:16:06 pm

According to your comments I am guessing that the movie "Jacob's Ladder" did a better job of telling a similar story trope and a much better twist ending. In know I was surprised when I first saw it, but I was much younger then.

Reply

orang

10/22/2016 04:46:26 pm

i hated that movie because i felt cheated by the ending.

Reply

Shane Sullivan

10/22/2016 05:52:10 pm

You mean M. Night Shyamalan didn't invent the twist ending!?

Reply

Only Me

10/22/2016 06:26:08 pm

That's the twist!

So, are you shocked, disappointed, satisfied....?

Reply

Shane Sullivan

10/22/2016 09:58:39 pm

First satisfied, then progressively more disappointed for each subsequent film.

Kal

10/22/2016 09:14:30 pm

In the original unchanged Terry Gilliam film Brazil, the entire movie is in the head of the office clerk as he is about to receive his 'sentence' for betraying the company in an odd dystopia, where the company rules the world. The Hollywood studio ending cuts it before he is clearly given a chemical lobotomy and he 'escapes into his mind' with a smile.

This is also similar to 'one flew Over the Cookoo's Nest' in that really did the Indian man escape? Or was all of this some kind of fantasy at the last minute? In the movie it literally is an escape. In the book, not so much.

Reply

K.DeFlane

10/22/2016 09:15:18 pm

And another movie has already done a similar story line of a VR video game with an immersive tech which tricks the user into thinking they have unplugged: eXistenZ (from way back in 1999), creepy enough to be called horror as well.

Reply

Kate H.

8/4/2018 01:38:10 am

I'm coming here a couple of years late, but I just now watched the episode. I recognized it as an "Owl Creek Bridge" story right away. My reaction, though, was that his death happened much earlier. Charlie Brooker hasn't said so, but I think Cooper died in a plane crash at the beginning of the episode. (So what about Brooker? Once art is out there, it belongs to the viewer anyway.)

Remember, when Cooper is on the, plane, the flight attendant tells him to turn off his phone? He does so, and that's maybe the second time he doesn't respond to his mother's call. Then, he comforts a little girl who is scared of the rough flight.

We do not see him get off the plane. We are still focused on his face on the plane when, immediately, we see a whirlwind of his travels. He travels too many places and has too many classic adventures, even getting a scar from running with the bulls. It looks more like his imagination than his reality. When he arrives in England, he easily finds a beautiful girl who loves gaming and goes to bed with him right away. She is undemanding, accepting, and helpful. Every young man's fantasy, right?

Throughout, he gets calls from his mother. Each time, he hesitates but then decides not to answer.

Next, he has an opportunity to go to a mysterious setting and take part in a fantastical game being developed by a famous game developer. That game leads to hallucinations that culminate with him returning home to his mother.

At that point, we see he has died. Someone zips a body bag over his face. The game developer's assistant, Katie, types. All we see on the screen is a time and a note that the cause of the crash was a phone call from his mother. Episode ends.

Although the implication is that the "crash" was the game malfunction, what if it was a plane crash? All through the episode, he considers answering those phone calls but realizes he shouldn't. He can never explain why. What if the reason is that his already knows, in the far reaches of his terrorized, dying mind, that answering the phone call contributed to the plane crash? In an "Owl Creek Bridge" story, the cause of death should happen near the beginning.

In the prevalent interpretation of this episode, the plane flight is incidental. Why, then, devote the time to him comforting the little girl? Was that thrown in for no purpose? I know cell phone signals are not that dangerous on airplanes in real life. Nevertheless, we've been told they are a hazard, because they interfere with signals. He is told to turn his off on the plane. What if it is then that he keeps the phone on and receives a call from his mother, not when he is starting the game?

Reply

Leave a Reply.

Author

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.